I slowly watched him disappear
I slowly watched him disappear was published as a monograph in 2015 by +Kris Graves Projects.
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From a narrow, organizational point of view, fantasies about warrior masculinity help generate a steady stream of recruits who are able and willing to serve in uniform, and a public that seems willing to accede to the Pentagon’s insatiable appetite for money. The purchase of those imaginations, however, depends on collective, willful ignorance about the artifice required to produce and sustain them. (Who would want to emulate a phony identification?) Willful ignorance, in turn, doesn’t just happen by accident. It requires a lot of effort to establish and sustain over time. Think about all the resources that went into the production of the posters on Sharrod’s walls, and then multiply those efforts and funds by a very large number.
“I slowly watched him disappear” destabilizes fantasies about military masculine status by calling into question some of its most sacred and axiomatic premises. By exposing its dependence, in other words, on constructed and phony myths."
-Aaron Belkin in the afterword for "I slowly watched him disappear"
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Artist Statement
In the winter of 2008, my father introduced me to Sharrod, a young man who was in his first year of high school at Salem High School in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Sharrod had recently enrolled in NJROTC, the National Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps, a military preparatory program offered in high schools nationwide. After explaining my connection to the military and that I was an alum of the same high school to both Sharrod and his mother, I asked if I might make a few photographs of Sharrod.
A few months later, I asked for permission to continue photographing Sharrod through his entire high school career. They both agreed and over the course of the next four years, Sharrod played out his military fantasies for my camera.
Sharrod also shared with me the photographs he was making with his cell phone and notebook doodles of weapon construction. These private images and examinations rub up against, color, and compliment the medium format images I made of Sharrod.
While making the images and video installations for I slowly watched him disappear, I wondered about the process within which the military body is formed both literally but also psychologically, visually, and emotionally. What is the process of indoctrination and how does the heavy flow of military marketing messages - specifically in military towns- foreclose possibilities for a life beyond the uniform? Furthermore, can one photographically locate the transition from civilian to member of the military unit?
Right before I made the first image of Sharrod, when he went to his bedroom to change, his mother turned to me and said, "Whenever he puts on his uniform, I no longer see my son."
"I slowly watched him disappear" is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA NYC, The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, and the libraries at the Rhode Island School of Design and Stanford University.
"To say that the United States has become deeply militarized is to posit, in part, that fantasies about warrior masculinity are ubiquitous. They are, and “I slowly watched him disappear” affirms that you don’t have to travel far to find their vestiges. The Marines Martial Arts poster taped to Sharrod’s bedroom wall, one of at least four Marines Corps placards that decorate his room, features a Marine in uniform punching the air, and a promise of fortification articulated in its inscription: “On Our Team You Develop Your Mind, Your Body And Your Spirit.” The military-as-organization and its defenders on the left and the right portray military masculine status as an ideal that all citizens should emulate. In turn, civilians buy into the mythology, even (especially?) those who decline to enlist.